]]>http://relations.ka2.de/2014/05/15/was-das-google-eugh-urteil-mit-den-soldatenmorden-von-lebach-zu-tun-hat/feed/2“To organise the worlds information about you, and make it accessible to Google”http://relations.ka2.de/2013/05/17/to-organise-the-worlds-information-about-you-and-make-it-accessible-to-google/
http://relations.ka2.de/2013/05/17/to-organise-the-worlds-information-about-you-and-make-it-accessible-to-google/#commentsFri, 17 May 2013 06:42:43 +0000http://relations.ka2.de/?p=2286Continue reading “To organise the worlds information about you, and make it accessible to Google”→]]>As most of you i’ve watched the Google I/O Keynote on tuesday. Because i was participating in a test of a live blogging software I did a fair amount of live tweeting.

Since i had to rush after 2 1/2 hours to be only one hour late to a dinner invitation, summarised the keynote with a tweet saying:

My summary of the first 2 1/2 hours of the #io13 keynote: meh meets spooky, and forget about interoperable standards, do it the google way

But this was only one part of the summary. The other deserves some more time and space than a tweet. Hence this post.

It was the modified version of Google’s mission statement that formed itself in the back of my head:

“To organise the worlds information about you and make it accessible to Google”

This is what the “sppoky” part of my tweet relates too.

For the first time did Google show off how the different initiatives (especially in the machine learning domain) come together in order to accrue as much information about a user as possible by providing useful services to him and track his activities.

As usual, there are two sides of a coin: In order to be able to provide Services like Google Now, or auto-awesome you need that vast amount of information and you need the progress in machine learning, NLP, … all that AI capabilities that Google has developed (standing on the shoulders of the AI research community as well as contributing heavily to it). For anybody interested in this topic i recommend to visit http://research.google.com. And subscribe to The Google Research Blog and the Recent Google Publications Feed (if you somehow can find the URLs for the feed, one sympton of what i meant by less and less using interoperable standards).

What also has changed from back in the days when i did AI research, is the way the services are realized (in the cloud vs. local ressources) and paid for (personal data and advertising vs. license fees). This heavily contributes to my attitude to not using services like Google Now etc.

I’d rather be able to pay real money in exchange to get a reasonable guarantee that my privacy is not invaded for potentially massively privacy invading services like Google Now and Auto-Awesome.

In this i’m a typical german after all :-)

What’s next

Reading the (currently) most recent Google Research Blog Post it becomes clear, that Google is not going to rest on it’s laurels:

We’ve already developed some quantum machine learning algorithms. One produces very compact, efficient recognizers — very useful when you’re short on power, as on a mobile device. Another can handle highly polluted training data, where a high percentage of the examples are mislabeled, as they often are in the real world. And we’ve learned some useful principles: e.g., you get the best results not with pure quantum computing, but by mixing quantum and classical computing.

Can we move these ideas from theory to practice, building real solutions on quantum hardware? Answering this question is what the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab is for. We hope it helps researchers construct more efficient and more accurate models for everything from speech recognition, to web search, to protein folding. We actually think quantum machine learning may provide the most creative problem-solving process under the known laws of physics.

Elsewhere

As usual, i’m not the only one to get that feeling, and by far not the smartest. Without further ado, Mashables and Ben Thompsons take on it:

Now, however, Google’s worldview is finally coming into focus. The tenuous threads that connect these dozens of different applications and services are strengthening and gradually being pulled closer together. Underneath it all is Google’s vast web of information and smarts, which is all about us.

What Google is about to do with all of it is either a thrilling or very scary prospect.

Ben Thompson: (his remarks on Henry McCracken quoted nearly in full, but go read it and subscribe to Ben’S blog)

I don’t know much about itches, but I believe the conventional wisdom is wrong: from Google’s perspective, Google+ is not a social network meant to compete with Facebook. Rather, it’s an identity system that follows you everywhere.

Think about it: what is more valuable? Inane chatter, memes, and baby photos, or every single activity you do online (and increasingly offline)? Google+ is about unifying all of Google’s services under a single log-in which can be tracked across the Internet on every site that serves Google ads, uses Google sign-in, or utilizes Google analytics.

Every feature of Google+ – or of YouTube, or Maps, or GMail, or any other service – is a flytrap meant to ensure you are logged in and being logged by Google at all times.

Google’s mission is ostensibly “To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

That was once true, but a better formulation today is: “To organize user information and make it universally trackable and marketable.”

A couple of hours ago Google pushed the recently announced changes to Google Reader. As the accompanying blog post says:

Today we’re rolling out the new Reader design, and the Google+ features that we mentioned just over a week ago. Before the day’s over, all Reader users will be able to enjoy the following improvements::

A new look and feel that’s cleaner, faster, and nicer to look at.

The ability to +1 a feed item (replacing “Like”), with an option to then share it with your circles on Google+ (replacing “Share” and “Share with Note”).

Integrating with Google+ also helps us streamline Reader overall. So starting today we’ll be turning off friending, following, shared items and comments in favor of similar Google+ functionality.

All this makes it clear that there is no technical reason for not having the old and the new version of Google Reader available in parallel. So Google, act up to the Google Reader Petition and make the “Classic” Version available as a configuration option / theme. You can even keep the new look and make the +1 Version the default theme. You can even turn it into an easter egg, e.g. embed the functionality with a display:none style (Greasemonkey etc) here i come. Just don’t retire the inofficial API.

If this is not going to happen, resp. there are a couple of plan Bs, including switching to starring instead of sharing,building a greasemonkey script that fuses the share functionality from the bookmarklet into the page, using a customized SendTo in conjunction with PressThis on a WP blog (would right now not work with Reeder) etc.

Update

Just bought Reeder for the Mac to be able to easily share from the Desktop again.

]]>http://relations.ka2.de/2011/11/01/google-reader-after-the-change/feed/0Your 46894 shared items are public – Why i care about the announced Google Reader changeshttp://relations.ka2.de/2011/10/24/google-reader-changes/
http://relations.ka2.de/2011/10/24/google-reader-changes/#commentsMon, 24 Oct 2011 17:35:02 +0000http://relations.ka2.de/?p=2126Continue reading Your 46894 shared items are public – Why i care about the announced Google Reader changes→]]>Google recently announced that it is going to make some changes to Google Reader in a Blog Post called: Upcoming changes to Reader: a new look, new Google+ features, and some clean-up. My initial reaction was the following tweet:

@googlereader ONE week advance notice for shutting down services. WtF? Shift-S & shared feed were THE reason for me 2 use Reader #fail

I am not amused, may be to the extend that i might fall under the category of people that are characterized in that Google post as:

We recognize, however, that some of you may feel like the product is no longer for you.

Right now, i’m actively thinking about alternative solutions. And i’m not the only one. Not surprisingly the one’s that are complaining are the most avid users. And what they are telling is mostly the same.

Although there are many other services out there that promise to bubble up relevant content based on my interests, the best product I’ve used to date was the human curation of my Google Reader friends. Not only did my group consistently share the top tech news I’d want to read, they also share those oddball but interesting stories from outside of tech, including humorous cartoons, popular videos, space and science news, parenting tips and other news completely unrelated to tech, but still compelling.

For one thing, Reader is only sort of a social network. In many senses it’s ananti-social network. Not in the sense that people in Reader are anti-social so much as the point is to harbor a small enclave of carefully selected people and create a safe-haven of sorts where that “carefully constructed human curated” list of shares and insights can flourish. In Reader, you don’t go after as many friends as possible. You certainly don’t see anyone from high school. Nobody shares photos of their kids. The discussions that do blossom are almost always very smart and focused. It’s the internet if the world were a more prefect place.

Or Courtney Stantons post:

I like that the primary verb of gReader is “share” – but not about you; about content that’s meaningful to you. I like that I have to click on a specific tab in order to get the little window that allows me to post only about myself.

My motivation for “human curation”

This brings me to the reason why i’m upset about the changes. The title of the post already says why. For me Google reader is THE essential tool for reading news, as well as a long running experiment in human curation. But from the sending side, not the receiving.

I’m a long time RSS-Feed reader and switched to Google Reader because i was able to access my feeds from multiple computers without losing sync of the read items. I then discovered the productivity gains of the keyboard shortcuts and the shared item feed.

At that point i decided to share all the posts that i found interesting via Shift-S. Interesting in an impartial sense, e.g. providing useful or meaningful information, looking at some topic from an interesting / different angle etc.

While the primary impetus for doing so was being able to access these items more easily and being able to archive them via another client, early on i also decided to make all shares public to everybody. First and foremost because i wanted to have as little as possible overhead while reading. But also out of curiosity if somebody would discover this “human curated” feed and would find it useful.

Over the time quite a number of my colleagues found it (ok, i stopped sending separate emails about interested stuff and directed them at my sgared item feed). But after Google started it’S recommendation engine, quite a number of Google Reader users are following my feed and there is a small but dedicated number of subscribers via other feed readers (as my Logfile shows).All in all im absolutely sure that my shared item feed has more readers than this blog.

On moving to plus

@googlereader Shift-s is fundamentally different to +1 (at least 4 me) Former is impersonal filtering/curating. Latter is personal sharing

It should be clear now that for me sharing on Google Reader is about curation or if you prefer another, more humble term, about filtering. It is not about liking, agreeing or recommending. Hence i always struggled with the german translation of Sharin within Google Reader: “Empfehlen”, which backtranslates to “Recommend”.

Google is saying that my shares on Google Reader will be changed into +1. Looking at the presumed place, the plusones section of my profile (still empty) if find the following text:

Your +1’s appear here. +1 the things around the web you like, agree with, or want to recommend to others.

And here we are at the heart of the problem. No: I neither like, agrre with or recommend these things. I simply share them. Some of you might think i’m nitpicking. May be i am. But my background in Knowledge Representtation and AI as well as my common sense want to separate my social “human curation” activities, from my recommendations, likes, opinions and emotions.

I tried to summarize all this in the following tweet:

What’s next?

These latter social activities are right now mostly happening on this blog and on Twitter (both for opionion andemotion) as well as my pinboard.in bookmark account (basically recommendations of technical things).

Recently switched from delicious to pinboard.in for basically the same reasons. I thought the changes especially in the T & C introduced by the new ownership were ridiculous and switched to another service where i’m more in control. But i habd plenty of time doing so. Yahoo announced that they were retiring delicious last December, and the switch to the new t&C was enforced only recently.

Google instead is giving only one week advance notice. This is definitely too short to come up with a soltuion for the third party providers that are using the inofficial Google Reader API. The one i care most about is Reeder, because it allows me to read (and easily share) on my iPad. Hopefully it will at least will work in reading mode after the changes.

@googlereader Do you think that Reeder and other apps can adapt in 1week? It will take that long in review. Ok, you don't care.

Even if an official API would be announced today and implemented by Silvio Rizzi in an instant, it would take a weeks time until the new app in the app store. So opefully Google is going to keep the inofficial API around , maybe even announce an official one.

In the meantime i’m going to look for a short-term workaround to sharing via send_to (at the moment either to pinboard, readability or to my own server). May be i’m reverting to the fever installation on my own server but then i would loose the iPad connectivity via Reeder. Supporting Fever and other services is supposedly on Silvio’s list. But this will definitely take some time

I’ll keep you posted.

P.S: This is the first post in which i’m using Blackbird Pie for embedding Tweets. Works like a charm. Highly recommended.

Awkward Showcase – A jQuery Plugin
This article was last updated on Apr 27, 2011

Awkward Showcase is a plugin for the JavaScript Framework jQuery. We call it a Content Slider. But it can do more then just slide the content. For example you can add tooltips, enable thumbnails, activate dynamic height and lots more.

Since version 1.0 it’s integrated with our Viewline Plugin enabling new innovative ways for displaying content on your website.

Monday

Some application developers, including Sony, say Apple has told them they can no longer sell e-books within their apps unless the transactions go through Apple’s system. Apple rejected Sony’s iPhone application, which would have let people buy and read e-books from the Sony Reader Store.

But Steve Haber, president of Sony’s digital reading division, said on Monday that Apple had told his company that from now on, all in-app purchases would have to go through Apple.

Obviously, in the wake of the situation this story was taken up within minutes by quite a number of outlets, e.g:

The Sony Reader Store is designed to work both with Sony Reader devices and third-party hardware. Installed on other devices, such as an iPad, the Sony Reader app acts as a digital locker and lets users access their e-books, magazines and newspapers, as well as purchase more content.

The move throws into question what might happen with similar digital reading apps, such as the popular Amazon’s Kindle store. Like Sony Reader, the Kindle store is designed both to use with Amazon’s Kindle devices as well as third-party products for which the Kindle app is available. Up to now, users have been able to use the Kindle app to read already-downloaded/purchased content; as well as buy new publications.

Even more troubling is the news that Apple is telling app developers that providing access to content purchased outside the App Store is also a no-no.

This is a dramatic change of policies for Apple that could have huge implications on other contents that provide access to “outside content.” Amazon’s Kindle app, for instance, gives users access to books purchased outside of the Apple ecosystem.

MG Siegler on his private blog merely commented that this is normal business.:

“We have not changed our developer terms or guidelines,” Trudy Muller, an Apple spokeswoman, said Tuesday. “We are now requiring that if an app offers customers the ability to purchase books outside of the app, that the same option is also available to customers from within the app with in-app purchase.”

This was also “well received” within the media ( a lot of them drawing the obvious connection to Amazons’s Kindle app).

But this also raises more questions. For example, if Amazon, or another “app store” operator (selling books, games, music or anything else, for that matter) is already sharing revenue on apps within it, will that secondary revenue share be a split of that 70 percent that the publishers are getting from Apple?

And does this mean that if Sony adds the iTunes IAP into the Reader app (which might be messy or confusing on something the size of an iPhone screen), that everything will be fine?

Now, Amazon’s Kindle app doesn’t conduct its purchases through the app itself — users are instead kicked off to a browser where they actually buy their books, and that content is then synced to the Kindle app. Apple’s rule is worded vaguely enough that it can claim this workaround is in violation of the guidelines. But it obviously hasn’t been enforced like this before now, so the notion that nothing has changed is clearly false.

It also doesn’t make a whole lot of sense from the user’s perspective. Apple is effectively telling developers that they can offer two purchase flows for content: one through the browser, and another via in-app purchases. Apple is obviously assuming people will prefer the latter because it’s quicker and simply requires the user to enter their Apple password. But developers have an incentive to push users toward the browser flow so that they don’t have to give Apple a 30% cut of each purchase. Which could mean we start seeing some bizarre checkout flows that are anything but user friendly.

Does the new policy really only apply to “books”, specifically? Apple gave the identical statement to several publications, each time specifically saying “books”. I would assume, though, that this applies to any purchased content, not just books. Books are simply the first type of content for which these rules are being applied.

What about pricing? Can Amazon comply with these new rules by selling its Kindle books through Apple’s in-app purchasing system with a 43 percent markup, to account for Apple’s 30 percent cut through the in-app API? Consider a Kindle book that Amazon sells for $10. Can they sell it for $14.30 through in-app purchasing? That way Amazon’s cut would remain $10. Or will Apple insist on price matching, meaning Amazon can only comply by accepting 30 percent less revenue on books purchased in-app compared to those purchased from Amazon directly.

Jim Dovey, Apple Platforms Team Lead at Kobo in Toronto, Ontario writes from the perspective of a store provider, also reminds us of the obvious economic consequences in his post:

At present, all in-app purchases require payment of 30% of list price to Apple. At present, this represents 100% of the profits granted to us eBook distributors by the publishers. Therefore, under the present rules, the details provided by Apple spokesperson Trudy Muller would require that 100% of our profit on a sale go to Apple:

Wednesday

On Wednesday Rupert Murdoch launched his daily iPad newspaper “TheDaily”. The daily is also the first iOS app that is able to use Apple’s news subscription plan. Apple’s Eddy Cuestated twice, one in the presentation and once in the Q & A that subscriptions are going to be available soon to other publishers. See for example Engadget’s live blog:

11:29AM When will the subscription model be available to other publishers? Eddy Cue: Available on the Daily today, and there’ll be an announcement for other publishers soon.

Apple is now requiring publishers that conduct sales of content—which includes books as well subscriptions—to offer a way to do so within apps, which will be handled by the iTunes billing system. The policy, which the company says isn’t new, was cited in Apple’s rejection of a Sony Corp. app for reading digital books earlier this week.

Yudu, a U.K. developer of digital editions for publishers, said it recently was informed by Apple that newspaper and magazine apps that don’t take payments through the iTunes store will be rejected, beginning March 31. The company was alerted to the impending change when it applied for a new app and received an email outlining Apple’s plans, Yudu Chief Executive Richard Stephenson said.

Apple traditionally takes a 30% cut from developers’ app sales, but it’s not known what the company’s share of subscription revenues would be. For its part, Apple contends that by managing the billing, it will help publishers sell more content.

Thursday

On Thursday the European Publishers raised their voice again, by telling the media that they “felt betrayed” and are planning a summit on February 17th. See e.g.

Grzegorz Piechota, the European president of the International Newsmedia Marketing Association—which represents some 5,000 members in 80 countries worldwide—told us that the INMA will be meeting with the European Online Publishers Association and the magazine association FIPP in a invitation-only roundtable on February 17 in London, to compare notes on Apple’s new subscription charging rules.

…

Up to now, a lot of publishers have been able to send users to an HTML page to manage their subscriptions, but the recent change in how subscriptions can be managed for newspaper and magazine apps—with new rules apparently coming in that mean a publisher has to also offer users the option to pay by Apple’s own in-app payments service, has some publishers feeling “They’ve been betrayed by Apple. Some are confused by Apple’s actions; but some say they feel betrayed.”

Why the confusion? According to Piechota, Apple has been inconsistent how it has been communicating, and implementing, its new policies. “Apple said yesterday that that in their policy with Sony Reader, they are not changing anything, just enforcing existing rules. But when they talk to publishers direct, they are saying something else.

“Apple has been contacting some publishers, and not contacting some. Some get emails, others get informal phone calls,” he said. “The whole process of accepting or rejecting apps is not transparent. It’s very hard to explain why some apps are being accepted and some are being refused; some apps allow you to read content that is bought somehwere else and others that won’t let you do this.”

While i agree with Piechota that Apple is inconsistent in its communication and still a lot of questions are open. I happen to to disagree on the following part:

Interestingly it seems like they did not bother to read the respective section in the changed App Store Terms and Conditions of the Apple App Store (see above screenshot). They all had to accept these T & C’s before they were able to download “The Daily” which i bet they all did. This sections is definitely not for “The Daily” only and publishers should be able to make an educated guess what kind of subscriptions they will get and what kind of user data they could expect to get from Apple. So to make sure they are able to read them again. Here they are (emphasis mine):

Certain App Store Products may include functionality that enables you to purchase content on a subscription basis (“Paid Subscriptions”). Paid Subscriptions are non-refundable. Paid Subscriptions will automatically renew for the applicable time period you have selected, and your Account will be charged no more than 24-hours prior to the expiration of the current Paid Subscription. You may cancel automatic renewal by selecting Manage App Subscriptions in your Account and selecting the subscription you want to modify. The auto-renew feature of the subscription will be turned off if the Licensor increases the price of the subscription. Certain Paid Subscriptions may offer a free trial prior to purchase. If you decide to purchase a Paid Subscription prior to the end of the free trial period, your Paid Subscription will start immediately. Also see additional information about the Paid Subscription offer at the point of sale within the App Store Product. We may ask for your permission to provide the name, email address and zip code listed in your Account to the Licensor so that the it can send you marketing messages about its own products in accordance with its publicly posted privacy policy. Once the Licensor has this information, it will be treated in accordance with the Licensor’s privacy policy. We encourage you to learn about the privacy practices of the Licensor before agreeing to give them your personal information. For more information, please review the Licensor’s privacy policy or contact the Licensor directly.

Friday

It looks like today it is going to be a quiet one. At least nothing of significance happened until now.

Outlook

Overall i think my predictions from the last post are still valid and i’m going to argue about this in a follow up post.

This post will also include some technical difficulties i see when Amazon, Sony etc will try to adapt to the In-App Purchase rule and some thoughts about the problems third party reading apps will face, as well as some thought experiment that shows that under some interpretation iBooks will violated Apple’s stated rules.

All this is more or less subject to the interpretation on “if an app offers customers the ability to purchase books outside of the app” phrase in Apple’s statement.

Economically the big question for me right now is if Apple is going to change it’s stance wrt. the percentage of it’s cut from in-app purchases right now. As i’ve argued in my last post, and others are arguing also, this rate should be definitely lower because Apple’s services are of lower value. Ideally the rate should be closer to a billing service /credit-card payment provider than to 30%.

But the following passage from an interview with Rupert Murdoch after the launch of the daily lowers my hopes for that:

Cavuto: I want to ask you, how much are you making on that? Because it’s $0.99, but typically, typically Apple takes a third.

Murdoch: That’s correct.

Cavuto: Now, is it taking a third here?

Murdoch: At least the first year, yes. We’ll be getting $0.70.

Cavuto: All right. But it goes—so you say at least the first year. It goes down after that?

Murdoch: We—no. Up, we hope.

Cavuto: But down for Apple.

Murdoch: That’s subject to negotiation.

Other reasons for not being bullish on lowering the cuts are that both Google and RIM introduced In-App Purchases to their AppStores this week see e.g. here and here). Yes , they both didn’t have In-App Purchase until now. And both are following Apple’s route to use the same cuts as for the initial delivery of the App: 30% in Google’s case and 20% in RIM’s case.

But maybe i’m taken by surprise and Apple is lowering this rate when it is opening up the subscriptions to all publishers in the app store. And this has to happen until Feb. 16th because than the sponsored period of “The Daily” will end.

First, on Jan. 14th there was a blog post (dutch) from the publisher of the dutch newspaper Handelsblad telling that Apple approached them telling them that they had to stop the free access to the iPad version of the newspaper that is available to their print subscribers until April 1st.. Other Publeshers joined in and this was widely reported, e.g. here. I then also heard some rumors that a number of german newspapers and magazines have been contacted as well.

These actions by Apple are obviously connected to the “more than” rumours that Apple is prepraing it’s own subscription service (together with it’s launch partner NewsCorp and it’s new iPad-only daily newspaper: “The Daily”.

Yesterday evening Frédéric Filloux of MondayNotes.com provided the IMHO best account on what is happening right now in his post Apple’s bet on publishing. I urge you to read Filloux’s whole post, especially since i share his opinion that Apple’s solution is more aiming at the “Long Tail of Publishers”. On the other hand the provided excerpts of the purported emails at least to me sound rather like a reminder of existing rules than a complete change of plans. The discussion is then taken on e.g in a R/WW post titled: The New New Media: Apple’s subscription model.

Based on all this it is my current belief that

Apple’s recent actions do not signal a fundamental change to their assumed inofficial position prior to theses actions.

With the assumed inofficial position (more on this wording below) being:

Same digital content available in other digital channels via own fulfillment backend is OK

In some follow up posts i’m going to elaborate on why i think that Apple’s position hasn’t changed fundamentally and also elaborate why obeying to these rules is particulary difficult for publishers of periodicals.

For now you have to live with the management summary:

If the first rule would be revoked, various Apps selling Books and streaming video including Amazon Kindle, Google Books, Hulu Plus and Netflix would violate them. First I haven’t heard that they have been notified and second Apple would have a harder time to revoke this Apps.

Publishers of periodicals and service providers like Adobe and Woodwing wanted to build new digital content bundles that take advantage of the capabilities of multitouch devices and not just display PDFs. Since for these new products right now there is no other channel than the iPad they cannot argue that they are distributing the same digital content on multiple digital channels. In addition most of them also deliberately chose not to distribute the same content via the most obvious channel: The browser. The publications that did so, most notably the WSJ and the FT have been allowed into the App Store. I haven’t heard that they have been noticed.

Compared to all other publishers, publishers of periodicals right now have a unique disadvantage on Apple’s platform. There is no way to do the content delivery via the platform, they had to build that part of the fulfillment platform themselves. Nevertheless they had to use Apples’s Billing Infrastructure for In-App-Purchases of single copies and the same 30% Apple cut applied.

The result of this hole in Apple’s fulfillment infrastructure were Hybrid Apps that used significant backend infrastructure from the publisher /service provider (content delivery) and Apple (billing) and opened the door to all kind of variations.

I think that Apple will fill the content delivery hole in their fulfillment system with their rumored subscription solution. If not the publishers have all reasons to complain about that disadvantage.

For the future i could imaging the following rule agreed upon Apple and all of its content providers:

Apps are only allowed to use either Apples fulfillment infrastructure and nothing else, or they have to build all of it by themselves (like Hulu and AFAIK all of the other examples from above etc. did). This should be a rule that everybody should be able to live with.

This might mean that a number of publishers would have to deploy two Apps on the App store but my guess would be that Apple is going to provide a separate Kisok app (similar to iBooks) for those who choose the first route.

My worst fear is that Apple is than overregulating the format of the conten bundles / issues that is going to be delivered via their infrastructure.

So if anybody knows of a publisher / App that plays along the above rules and has been notified i would be utmost interested to learn about it and have a closer look. The first question of such a publischer should be: what about Hulu. netflix, Amazon Kindle, Google Books etc

I would also like to hear some technical rumours about Apple’s subscription / iNewsstand. But i guess that besides a select few partners with draconian NDAs nobody knows right now. Everybody else has to wait until the announcement Another question of interest on this side of the pond is whether and when it will be rolled out in markets other than the US.

But IMHO the biggest problem of it all this FUD is that there is only an assumed inofficial position and not an official one. That makes it particulary difficult for people like me , who are building systems for periodicals but are not on Apple’s radar, so they do not get the chance to talk to Apple and learn the inoffical one that is only deliverd orally-

Disclosure:For more than a year i’m actively involved (in my capacity as the head of the dpa-newslab) in the developement of various e-reading solutions. Since May of last year we are focusing most of our efforts on a framework for newspapers with the obvious first incarnation as an iPad App. Since we are not a big publisher we do not have any direct connection to Apple. We also don’t have an App in the store yet, so we couldn’t have been rejected yet :-)

I’ll share more on our approach to in upcoming posts. For the purpose of this post it suffices to say, that on the business side we early on dedided to play it save and start with a single-copy In-App-Purchase, and to avoid any “clever” subscription scheme. For the curious. We decided to do a Web-Technology first approach . Our content packages are purely web based (HTML5, CSS§, Javascript and JSON), and we only use a native rendering when the typical shortcomings of mobile devices kick in and affect the user experience: These shortcomings being slower processer, less memory.

A nice side effect of this approach in the context of this post that it makes it easy for us to come up desktop browser version and hence a second digital channel for the same digital content.

Over a year ago i sent two tweets to @timoreilly. These tweets started what i think is a showcase of ultimate customer service and (i hope) helped bringing a new product: the virtual bundle at O’Reilly Media into place.

This blog post is about that story.

Prologue

Regular readers of this blog know that i buy quite some programming and computer science books. They also know that part of my job is defining and implementing innovative solutions for news publishers in the ebook space. Hence i know that O’Reilly publishes (most of) its books DRM-free in a number of different formats (including PDF and EPUB).

This books can be purchased via the O’Reilly Web store, either as stand alone digital products or as physical + digital bundles. Whereas the standalone products are priced at approx. 80% of the physical book, the price of the physical plus digital is typically physical + 5$.

The latter option definitely is interesting for guys like me. But here are two problems with it:

I still prefer to buy them at a (certain) physical bookstore.

These bundles are only available in the US

I’m lucky to have Lehmanns Fachbuchhandlung in Hamburg, a science bookstore dedicated to Computer Science / Programming and Medical Science. It’s staff is quite extraordinary in providing tips, sharing information about books that i might be interested in havin regular meetings of the community (often with very interesting invited talks), … In short: They do a great job and i want to support them in every possible way.

Act I

Late last June i once again bought a couple of books at Lehmanns, including 3 books from O’Reilly Media. Hence i asked them to ask O’Reilly if there is a way that i can buy the books at a physical bookstore and tu purchase the discounted ebook version, i.e. a virtual bundle of the physical book bought at a bookstore and the digital book bought at oreilly.com.

A couple of days later Lehmanns got back to me and told me that there was a no go from O’Reilly USA for bundle deals. Since i follow @timoreilly on Twitter i knew that Tim O’Reilly is actively using Twitter for his business. Hence early next morning i sent the following two tweets @timoreilly:

@timoreilly bought (again) 3 oreilly books at local german bookstore.asked them if thr is sum way 2 get a print + epub bundle
@timoreilly bookstore contacted Oreilly germany which responded: No go from oreilly usa for bundle deals #fail

Much to my surprise only 10 minutes later i got the following DM from Tim O’Reilly:

send mail with details to savikas@oreilly.com and me tim@oreilly.com

Since i’ve been to the O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing (ToC) conference in February 2009, i knew that Andrew Savikas is the VP, Digital Initiatives at O’Reilly.

So this DM was basically an invitation to directly tell the two people in command of the business how i think it can and should be improved.

Given that possibility i basically wrote them the the same story i told you:

Hello Tim, Hello Mr. Savikas,

…

So now for the details i was asked for:

Ever since ToC 2009 (BTW great conference) i was wondering if it is possible to buy print plus ebook bundles outside the United States. Me and my wife are avid OReilly fans and i guess that ovet time we have purchased around 100 different titles privately.

We are also fans of our local bookstore which is the best computer bookstore in germany. The level of expertise and service is simply unmatched and we happily shell out some more Euros for that experience (compared to an online store).

Especially for computer science books the combination of a printed book bundled with an ebook is very attractive to me and i guess others to. You read the physical book in order to understand the topics or simply have a good read. But you also want to carry all your bookshlef around and have it available at your fingertips (and fully searchable) when you are at your laptop, iphone, …). I’m fairly sure that similar reasoning led to the print and ebook bundles available at oreilly.com.

Unfortunately this kind of bundles are not available outside the United States at least not at O’Reilly.de . Moreover, as said above i want to support my local bookstore

…

I then took the chance to introduce the bookstore to the bundle concept and how i wanted to be able to buy the physical book at the store and get the ebook as a bundle deal.

They took action and got in contact with O’Reilly Germany and sent me an email saying that O’Reilly Germany got back t hem saying that they are not authorized to do bundle deals.

So ultimately i want to be able to buy a book at the bookstore and then be able to buy the electronic version of that book for a heaviliy discounted price. Other publishers enable this by embedding disount codes into the printed titles, or force one to enter the 14th word in the third line on page 25 or whatever. I certainly want a good user experience but wouldn’t mind to jump through some hoops for getting the discounted eBook. E.g. registering the books at oreilly.com, whatever.

…

So hopefully i’m able to trigger a process within O’Reilly that finally ends in providing this kind of service. Or, even better, just gives me the information how to do this today.

Sincerely

Gerd Kamp

Andrew Savikas got back to me the same day telling me that they were working on a solution for this, but some key people were on vacation and i had to wait a couple of weeks.

Hello Gerd,

..

I agree that it would be good to provide the ebook versions at a deep discount to customers who purchase our print books. I am discussing coding options with our printers, and working with the oreilly.com team on how to implement such a program. They are working on some major upgrades to oreilly.com, including an expanded “membership” program, and ebook discounts for print purchases are a part of that project.

..
Thank you for the kind words about the TOC Conference, for buying our books, and for letting us know how we can make you happier with us and our books.

Regards

Andrew Savikas
VP, Digital Initiatives
O’Reilly Media, Inc.

Tim O’Reilly also answered personally (on July 4th):

Thanks a lot for the info, Gerd. I will investigate and see how we can do this. In the meantime, I’m sure we can come up with a workaround for you.

In mid-August i hadn’t heard back from O’Reilly. Since i had just bought another couple of O’Reilly books and was preparing for my own holidays. Since i like to read not only fiction in my holidays i sent another mail at Andrew and Tim, asking if there would be some way to get early access to their virtual bundle deal.

Since i’m going on vacation at the beginning of september it would be great if we can find a workaround, e.g, some discount code for oreilly.com tied to my account. … This would enable me to carry these books in electronic form

Again the same day someone from O’Reilly got back to me:

We’ll have an ebook upgrade program in place in two weeks. The program will allow anyone who has purchased an English language book (sorry, but no DE titles, yet) to upgrade to the electronic version for $4.99. We’d launch it now but we’re waiting for two people to return from vacation and to make sure the kinks are all worked out. In the meantime, if you send me a list of books you want to upgrade I’ll have our customer service folks take care of you in time for your vacation.

So i sent them a list of the twelve ebooks i wanted to purchase. Again same day:

Dear Mr. Kamp,

Thank your for your request. We have created an order for you of the titles you requested, with the total coming out to $59.88. I have attached the invoice for the order for your review. If you find the order satisfactory, please call our customer service line at (707) 827-7019 with a credit card number and we will go ahead and process it. You may also fax your credit card number if you like to (707) 824-8268. Once payment has been received, we will deposit the e-books into your account and you will have instant access. Thank you again for your order.

So i called them. When i was just beginning to tell them why i was calling, they told me:

Mr. Kamp, i guess you are calling to give me the credit card for that ebook order of yours. We are a small department so we basically all know the pending issues.

Immediately after giving them my credit card number the books were loaded into my bookshelf at members.oreilly.com and i could take them with me :

After that i thanked everybody for this most awesome customer service and asked them if it is ok to blog about the upcoming upgrade programme. They asked me to wait until it is in place.

Act II

At the end of September (so it took them more than tqo weeks :-) i received the following offer via email:

Although it announced that the promotion was only valid for one month, it in fact worked at least until the end of last year and i used it to buy virtual bundles of all the O’Reilly books i bought.

I already thought that this would be the permanent option but was a bit skeptical because it was not officially announced.

Hence i still refrained from writing this post. But after my last purchase i recognized the MB5UP promotion code heavily advertised when you log in into your member page (see image at the beginning of this post). This finally triggered me to finally write this story up.

Epilogue

For me this is a story of two tales.

Firstly it is about the best ebook offer you can get on the planet. Lifetime access to the digital version of the book, all DRM-free together with a heavily discounted price if you also bought the printed version. To summarize, in order to get a virtual ebook bundle from O’Reilly you have to:

Buy the book at the local bookstore,

Register it with your member account at O’Reilly (you should always do this because you get access to the errata page of this book)

Add the book to your shopping cart

Use the code MB5UP at checkout

But secondly, and at least as important, it is a stoy about how to use social media for the most awesome customer service .

[Update:] Since this question came up within my work at dpa and we are a Google Maps enterprise customer, i contacted the support (a first). They got back to me within 3 hours (not 2 bad) and pointed me to this public page. It is a licensing issue (probably with GIsrael).

I just recognized that the maps that Google show for Israel on their own domain are very different from the maps one gets when using the Google Maps API (even the premier version).

If this an effect of MapMaker data not shown via the Maps API , licensing issues with MAPA GIsrael, just a matter of updating the maps, or other issues ? Does anybody know of other areas of the world where the Maps API maps are significantly worse than the Google Maps maps?

This is a short post about my first impressions after using the iPad and some of the applications i downloaded. I wasn’t able to spend more time yet, because i’m attending wherecamp today and tomorrow and then flying back to germany. But i thought it would be a worthwile exercise.

Buying experience

Since i knew i would be in the area i registered for picking up a 32GB iPad at the Palo Alto Store on March 12th. Yesterday i then decided not to come in early and be at the front of the line. Hence i turned up at the store a couple of minutes after 9am. At that time the queue for preordered phones was approx. 70metres long while the purchase line was only about 20metres long. Since i overheard that the preordered line was served first, i stayed with my original plan to pickup the preordered one. As expected, not only buyers showed up but also spectators and the media.

As a german i wondered why people showed up to pickup their preordered iPads when the can it have delivered at home. Most of them seemed to be there to meet friends, have some fun and share the experience.

While waiting we the preordered units where checked in by Apple staff with a custom app on their iphones, and we were treated with krispykremes and water. It took me about one hour to get to the front of the line. While waiting i notices that Robert Scoble was there and overheard him telling somebody else that he was first in line (funnily i also overheard some seemingly senior Apple hardware engineer that came to the store not recognizing Scoble but only talking about “this guy”).

I was assigned a staff member (Hi, Kevin) that helped me pickup my purchase. As usual with the Apple stores, the store was on my credit card companies blacklist, but as opposed to the store on 5th Avenue, the additional authorization worked at the first try.

I didn’t buy any additional stuff but the VGA video adapter and was done in about 5 minutes total.

Scott Forstall and Katie (Cotton)

As Scott Forstall was at the store and talking to customers, i had to walk over and ask him about any new details on the europe launch. Instead of answering himself he took the safe route and relayed the question to Katie (obviously Katie Cotton) who unsurprisingly gave me the official line of “end of April”. Nevertheless the fact of Scott being there and me being able to just walk over and ask him was a nice thing.

Activation

You might already have read it: You can’t use the iPad without having it connected to a computer that has iTunes installed. Since it is not neccessary to register the iPad (it is even not (yet) possible to register the iPad with a german phone number) and applications can be downloaded over wifi, there is actual no urgent need to have this step.

I unboxed and activated my iPad at Googles car park before going to Wherecamp2010. Since i already downloaded most of the apps i wanted to test / buy yesterday, i was able to sync them on the device without taking to much time from the conference sessions.

General impressions

In this post i will only give some general impressions about the device and the various apps i have used (mainly news related apps). A more detailed review of the different news apps will follow suitly. for the general impressions i will focus on the parts that you probably might not have heard elsewhere.

The iPad is definitely the couch surfing / computing / video watching device i had hoped for. Especially watching video, both video synced from iTunes / iTunesU as well as video streamed via wifi (e.g. in the Reuters, BBC and ABC apps) was amazingly good. I definitely can see this device as a major step for no longer needing a TV set. It makes watching video whereever you have a wifi connection so easy and seamless . You can even watch it together with your spouse without too many problems.

Unfortunately i’m not sure that you will be able to watch web based video on the big screen, since the VGA adapter seemingly only works with certain applications, such as Videos, Keynote and Youtube. As with the iPhone and the composite/s-video out it does not replicate the iPad display on an external screen. Since all the apps i’ve seen the video out working with are Apple apps, and i’m not aware of an Video-Out API i’m afraid, that video out might be something that is dissappointing.

Update: Jens tells me that there is an Video Out API. Thanks a lot

Unfortunately i’m right now unable to test if H.264 encoded video will work within safari as well as third party apps.

After reading the reviews i’m also positely surprised of the useability of the onscreen keyboard in landscape mode. It is definitely good enough for me for note taking during meetings and conferences (tested it this afternoon at wherecamp).

Pixeldoubling IMHO works well enough with most iPhone only apps that i’m wondering why the heck they didn’t make it an option that is enabled by default and you have to enable it for every single app. At least it remembers the setting for the app.